“In reply, General McClellan asks, ‘How long could McCook keep Buckner out of Louisville, holding the railroad, with power to destroy it inch by inch?’—giving no hint of a purpose to send reënforcements, but looking to the probable abandonment of Kentucky. Previous to this, General Sherman had had an interview with Secretary Cameron, in presence of Adjutant-General Thomas, at Lexington, Kentucky, and fully explained to him the situation of his command, and also of the armies opposed to him; and, on being asked what force was necessary for a successful forward movement in his department, answered, ‘Two hundred thousand men.’ By the 1st of November, Adjutant-General Thomas’s official report of this conversation, in all its details, was published in most of the newspapers of the country, giving the enemy full knowledge of many important facts relating to General Sherman’s department. He was too weak to defend his lines; and the enemy knew it. He had no hope of reënforcements, and, withal, was evidently in discredit with the War Department, as being too apprehensive of the power, strength, and resources of the enemy. He, therefore, felt he could not successfully conduct the campaign, and asked to be relieved. He was succeeded by General Buell, who was at once reënforced, and enabled to hold his defensive positions until Grant, the following spring, should advance down the Mississippi and up the Cumberland. “General Sherman was now set down as ‘crazy,’ and quietly retired to the command of Benton Barracks, near St. Louis. The evidence of his insanity was his answer to the Secretary of War—_that to make a successful advance against the enemy, then strongly posted at all strategic points from the Mississippi to Cumberland Gap, would require an army two hundred thousand strong_! The answer was the inspiration or the judgment of a military genius; but to the mind of Mr. Secretary Cameron it was the prophecy of a false wizard. “It has been said of the Spaniards, ‘that they generally managed to have an army when they had no general, and a general when they had no army;’ and during the first years of the war we surpassed in folly their example. It was vainly expected the rebellion could effectually be put down without either a general or an army, by a mere flourish of trumpets—as if the foundations of the Confederacy, like the walls of Jericho, would yield and fall at the blowing of a ram’s horn. Subsequent events have sufficiently vindicated General Sherman’s opinion expressed in his reply to the Secretary of War.